IMG_1209

Attending this week’s Strata conference it was easy to see quite how prolific the NYC Data Mafia is when it comes to writing.  Some of the found books:

And, of course, my book will be out soon to join them.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

We are fighting the large complex data war on a many fronts from theoretical statistics to distributed computing to our own large complex datasets.  So time is tight.

Bill Cleveland

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

The wonderful people at Gilt are having me teach an introductory course on R this Friday.

The class starts with the very basics such as variable types, vectors, data.frames and matrices.  After that we explore munging data with aggregate, plyr and reshape2.  Once the data is prepared we will use ggplot2 to visualize it and then fit models using lm, glm and decision trees.

Most of the material comes from my upcoming book R for Everyone.

Participants are encouraged to bring computers so they can code along with the live examples.  They should also have R and RStudio preinstalled.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Michael Malecki recently shared a link to a Business Insider article that discussed the Monty Hall Problem.

The problem starts with three doors, one of which has a car and two of which have a goat. You choose one door at random and then the host reveals one door (not the one you chose) that holds a goat. You can then choose to stick with your door or choose the third, remaining door.

Probability theory states that people who switch win the car two-thirds of the time and those who don’t switch only win one-third of time.

But people often still do not believe they should switch based on the probability argument alone. So let’s run some simulations.

This function randomly assigns goats and cars behind three doors, chooses a door at random, reveals a goat door, then either switches doors or does not.

monty <- function(switch=TRUE)
{
    # randomly assign goats and cars
    doors <- sample(x=c("Car", "Goat", "Goat"), size=3, replace=FALSE)

    # randomly choose a door
    doorChoice <- sample(1:3, size=1)

    # get goat doors
    goatDoors <- which(doors == "Goat")
    # show a door with a goat
    goatDoor <- goatDoors[which(goatDoors != doorChoice)][1]

    if(switch)
        # if we are switching choose the other remaining door
    {
        return(doors[-c(doorChoice, goatDoor)])
    }else
        # otherwise keep the current door
    {
        return(doors[doorChoice])
    }
}

Now we simulate switching 10,000 times and not switching 10,0000 times

withSwitching <- replicate(n = 10000, expr = monty(switch = TRUE), simplify = TRUE)
withoutSwitching <- replicate(n = 10000, expr = monty(switch = FALSE), simplify = TRUE)

head(withSwitching)
## [1] "Goat" "Car"  "Car"  "Goat" "Car"  "Goat"
head(withoutSwitching)
## [1] "Goat" "Car"  "Car"  "Car"  "Car"  "Car"

mean(withSwitching == "Car")
## [1] 0.6678
mean(withoutSwitching == "Car")
## [1] 0.3408

Plotting the results really shows the difference.

require(ggplot2)
## Loading required package: ggplot2
require(scales)
## Loading required package: scales
qplot(withSwitching, geom = "bar", fill = withSwitching) + scale_fill_manual("Prize", 
    values = c(Car = muted("blue"), Goat = "orange")) + xlab("Switch") + ggtitle("Monty Hall with Switching")

qplot(withoutSwitching, geom = "bar", fill = withoutSwitching) + scale_fill_manual("Prize", 
    values = c(Car = muted("blue"), Goat = "orange")) + xlab("Don't Switch") + 
    ggtitle("Monty Hall without Switching")

(How are these colors? I’m trying out some new combinations.)

This clearly shows that switching is the best strategy.

The New York Times has a nice simulator that lets you play with actual doors.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Some Pi Day pictures I’ve come across today.  Really love how so many people are getting into the holiday.

That was my favorite, more after the break.  I’ll continue updating as they catch my eye.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

2013
2013

Continuing the annual tradition of Pi Cakes from Chrissie Cook we have gotten another Pi Cake!  This year we let Drew Conway’s wife pick the flavors and she went with vanilla and red velvet (the blue color is to cause some cognitive dissonance).  Looking forward to enjoying this tonight after some pizza.

Previous cakes in the gallery after the break.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

plot of chunk map-plot

Given the warnings for today’s winter storm, or lack of panic, I thought it would be a good time to plot the NYC evacuation maps using R. Of course these are already available online, provided by the city, but why not build them in R as well?

I obtained the shapefiles from NYC Open Data on February 28th, so it’s possible they are the new shapefiles redrawn after Hurricane Sandy, but I am not certain.

First we need the appropriate packages which are mostly included in maptools, rgeos and ggplot2.

require(maptools) 
## Loading required package: maptools 
## Loading required package: foreign 
## Loading required package: sp 
## Loading required package: lattice 
## Checking rgeos availability: TRUE 
require(rgeos) 
## Loading required package: rgeos 
## Loading required package: stringr 
## Loading required package: plyr 
## rgeos: (SVN revision 348) GEOS runtime version: 3.3.5-CAPI-1.7.5 Polygon ## checking: TRUE 
require(ggplot2) 
## Loading required package: ggplot2 
require(plyr) require(grid) 
## Loading required package: grid 

Then we read in the shape files, fortify them to turn them into a data.frame for easy plotting then join that back into the original data to get zone information.

# read the shape file evac <- readShapeSpatial("../data/Evac_Zones_with_Additions_20121026/Evac_Zones_with_Additions_20121026.shp") # necessary for some of our work gpclibPermit() 
## [1] TRUE 
# create ID variable evac@data$id <- rownames(evac@data) # fortify the shape file evac.points <- fortify(evac, region = "id") # join in info from data evac.df <- join(evac.points, evac@data, by = "id") # modified data head(evac.df) 
## long lat order hole piece group id Neighbrhd CAT1NNE Shape_Leng ## 1 1003293 239790 1 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## 2 1003313 239782 2 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## 3 1003312 239797 3 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## 4 1003301 240165 4 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## 5 1003337 240528 5 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## 6 1003340 240550 6 FALSE 1 0.1 0 <NA> A 9121 ## Shape_Area ## 1 2019091 ## 2 2019091 ## 3 2019091 ## 4 2019091 ## 5 2019091 ## 6 2019091 
# as opposed to the original data head(evac@data) 
## Neighbrhd CAT1NNE Shape_Leng Shape_Area id ## 0 <NA> A 9121 2019091 0 ## 1 <NA> A 12250 54770 1 ## 2 <NA> A 10013 1041886 2 ## 3 <NA> B 11985 3462377 3 ## 4 <NA> B 5816 1515518 4 ## 5 <NA> B 5286 986675 5 

Now, I’ve begun working on a package to make this step, and later ones easier, but it’s far from being close to ready for production. For those who want to see it (and contribute) it is available at https://github.com/jaredlander/mapping. The idea is to make mapping (including faceting!) doable with one or two lines of code.

Now it is time for the plot.

ggplot(evac.df, aes(x = long, y = lat)) + geom_path(aes(group = group)) + geom_polygon(aes(group = group, fill = CAT1NNE)) + list(theme(panel.grid.major = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.text.y = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank(), panel.background = element_blank())) + coord_equal() + labs(x = NULL, y = NULL) + theme(plot.margin = unit(c(1, 1, 1, 1), "mm")) + scale_fill_discrete("Zone") 

plot of chunk map-plot

There are clearly a number of things I would change about this plot including filling in the non-evacuation regions, connecting borders and smaller margins. Perhaps some of this can be accomplished by combining this information with another shapefile of the city, but that is beyond today’s code.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

An often requested feature for Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package is the ability to vertically dodge points, lines and bars. There has long been a function to shift geoms to the side when the x-axis is categorical: position_dodge. However, no such function exists for vertical shifts when the y-axis is categorical. Hadley usually responds by saying it should be easy to build, so here is a hacky patch.

All I did was copy the old functions (geom_dodge, collide, pos_dodge and PositionDodge) and make them vertical by swapping y's with x's, height with width and vice versa. It's hacky and not tested but seems to work as I'll show below.

First the new functions:

require(proto)
## Loading required package: proto
collidev <- function(data, height = NULL, name, strategy, check.height = TRUE) {
    if (!is.null(height)) {
        if (!(all(c("ymin", "ymax") %in% names(data)))) {
            data <- within(data, {
                ymin <- y - height/2
                ymax <- y + height/2
            })
        }
    } else {
        if (!(all(c("ymin", "ymax") %in% names(data)))) {
            data$ymin <- data$y
            data$ymax <- data$y
        }
        heights <- unique(with(data, ymax - ymin))
        heights <- heights[!is.na(heights)]
        if (!zero_range(range(heights))) {
            warning(name, " requires constant height: output may be incorrect", 
                call. = FALSE)
        }
        height <- heights[1]
    }
    data <- data[order(data$ymin), ]
    intervals <- as.numeric(t(unique(data[c("ymin", "ymax")])))
    intervals <- intervals[!is.na(intervals)]
    if (length(unique(intervals)) > 1 & any(diff(scale(intervals)) < -1e-06)) {
        warning(name, " requires non-overlapping y intervals", call. = FALSE)
    }
    if (!is.null(data$xmax)) {
        ddply(data, .(ymin), strategy, height = height)
    } else if (!is.null(data$x)) {
        message("xmax not defined: adjusting position using x instead")
        transform(ddply(transform(data, xmax = x), .(ymin), strategy, height = height), 
            x = xmax)
    } else {
        stop("Neither x nor xmax defined")
    }
}

pos_dodgev <- function(df, height) {
    n <- length(unique(df$group))
    if (n == 1) 
        return(df)
    if (!all(c("ymin", "ymax") %in% names(df))) {
        df$ymin <- df$y
        df$ymax <- df$y
    }
    d_width <- max(df$ymax - df$ymin)
    diff <- height - d_width
    groupidx <- match(df$group, sort(unique(df$group)))
    df$y <- df$y + height * ((groupidx - 0.5)/n - 0.5)
    df$ymin <- df$y - d_width/n/2
    df$ymax <- df$y + d_width/n/2
    df
}

position_dodgev <- function(width = NULL, height = NULL) {
    PositionDodgev$new(width = width, height = height)
}

PositionDodgev <- proto(ggplot2:::Position, {
    objname <- "dodgev"

    adjust <- function(., data) {
        if (empty(data)) 
            return(data.frame())
        check_required_aesthetics("y", names(data), "position_dodgev")

        collidev(data, .$height, .$my_name(), pos_dodgev, check.height = TRUE)
    }

})

Now that they are built we can whip up some example data to show them off. Since this was inspired by a refactoring of my coefplot package I will use a deconstructed sample.

# get tips data
data(tips, package = "reshape2")

# fit some models
mod1 <- lm(tip ~ day + sex, data = tips)
mod2 <- lm(tip ~ day * sex, data = tips)

# build data/frame with coefficients and confidence intervals and combine
# them into one data.frame
require(coefplot)
## Loading required package: coefplot
## Loading required package: ggplot2
df1 <- coefplot(mod1, plot = FALSE, name = "Base", shorten = FALSE)
df2 <- coefplot(model = mod2, plot = FALSE, name = "Interaction", shorten = FALSE)
theDF <- rbind(df1, df2)
theDF
##    LowOuter HighOuter LowInner HighInner     Coef            Name Checkers
## 1    1.9803    3.3065  2.31183    2.9750  2.64340     (Intercept)  Numeric
## 2   -0.4685    0.9325 -0.11822    0.5822  0.23202          daySat      day
## 3   -0.2335    1.1921  0.12291    0.8357  0.47929          daySun      day
## 4   -0.6790    0.7672 -0.31745    0.4056  0.04408         dayThur      day
## 5   -0.2053    0.5524 -0.01589    0.3630  0.17354         sexMale      sex
## 6    1.8592    3.7030  2.32016    3.2421  2.78111     (Intercept)  Numeric
## 7   -1.0391    1.0804 -0.50921    0.5506  0.02067          daySat      day
## 8   -0.5430    1.7152  0.02156    1.1507  0.58611          daySun      day
## 9   -1.2490    0.8380 -0.72725    0.3163 -0.20549         dayThur      day
## 10  -1.3589    1.1827 -0.72349    0.5473 -0.08811         sexMale      sex
## 11  -1.0502    1.7907 -0.34000    1.0804  0.37022  daySat:sexMale  day:sex
## 12  -1.5324    1.4149 -0.79560    0.6781 -0.05877  daySun:sexMale  day:sex
## 13  -0.9594    1.9450 -0.23328    1.2189  0.49282 dayThur:sexMale  day:sex
##          CoefShort       Model
## 1      (Intercept)        Base
## 2           daySat        Base
## 3           daySun        Base
## 4          dayThur        Base
## 5          sexMale        Base
## 6      (Intercept) Interaction
## 7           daySat Interaction
## 8           daySun Interaction
## 9          dayThur Interaction
## 10         sexMale Interaction
## 11  daySat:sexMale Interaction
## 12  daySun:sexMale Interaction
## 13 dayThur:sexMale Interaction
# build the plot
require(ggplot2)
require(plyr)
## Loading required package: plyr
ggplot(theDF, aes(y = Name, x = Coef, color = Model)) + geom_vline(xintercept = 0, 
    linetype = 2, color = "grey") + geom_errorbarh(aes(xmin = LowOuter, xmax = HighOuter), 
    height = 0, lwd = 0, position = position_dodgev(height = 1)) + geom_errorbarh(aes(xmin = LowInner, 
    xmax = HighInner), height = 0, lwd = 1, position = position_dodgev(height = 1)) + 
    geom_point(position = position_dodgev(height = 1), aes(xmax = Coef))

plot of chunk make-Plot

Compare that to the multiplot function in coefplot that was built using geom_dodge and coord_flip.

multiplot(mod1, mod2, shorten = F, names = c("Base", "Interaction"))

plot of chunk multiplot

With the exception of the ordering and plot labels, these charts are the same. The main benefit here is that avoiding coord_flip still allows the plot to be faceted, which was not possible with coord_flip.

Hopefully Hadley will be able to take these functions and incorporate them into ggplot2.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

plot of chunk plot-play-by-down

Continuing with the newly available football data (new link) and inspired by a question from Drew Conway I decided to look at play selection based on down by the Giants for the past 10 years.

Visually, we see that until 2011 the Giants preferred to run on first and second down.  Third down is usually a do-or-die down so passes will dominate on third-and-long.  The grey vertical lines mark Super Bowls XLII and XLVI.

Code for the graph after the break.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Class Photo

About a month ago we had our final Data Science class of the semester.  We took a great class photo that I meant to share then but am just getting to it now.

I also snapped a great shot of Adam Obeng in front of an NYC Data Mafia slide during his class presentation.

NYC Data Mafia Slide

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.